The secret illegal wealth and dealings of notable world leaders, politicians and billionaires has been exposed in one of the biggest leaks of financial documents.

The leak titled the Pandora Papers shows some 35 current and former leaders and more than 300 public officials featured in the files from offshore companies.

The document revealed that the King of Jordan secretly amassed £70m of UK and US property.

It could also be seen in the document that ex-UK PM Tony Blair and his wife saved £312,000 in stamp duty when they bought a London office.The couple bought an offshore firm that owned the building.

The leak also links Russian President Vladimir Putin to secret assets in Monaco, and shows the Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis – facing an election later this week – failed to declare an offshore investment company used to purchase two villas for £12m in the south of France.

The so-called “Pandora Papers” investigation — involving some 600 journalists from media including The Washington Post, the BBC and The Guardian — is based on the leak of some 11.9 million documents from 14 financial services companies around the world.

In most countries, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) who analyzed the documents stresses that it is not illegal to have assets offshore or to use shell companies to do business across national borders.

But such revelations are no less of an embarrassment for leaders who may have campaigned publicly against tax avoidance and corruption, or advocated austerity measures at home.

Here is a link to ‘Pandora Papers’;

https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/global-investigation-tax-havens-offshore/